How Edgar Wright Nearly Blew His Idea for Baby Driver on a 2002 Music Video

You've probably heard already: Baby Driver is the best, most original action movie of the summer. This is in part thanks to an incredible cast and a rip-roaring soundtrack, but none of it would have been possible without Edgar Wright at the helm.

Wright's made a name for himself for his fast, funny, surprisingly violent movies that inspire as many laughs as they do gasps. His "Blood and Ice Cream" trilogy, so called due to their ridiculous body counts and an ongoing motif involving a British freezer snack, the cornetto.. He also directed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, an ambitious, incredible-looking film. He was also eight weeks out from beginning shooting on his passion project, Marvel's Ant-Man, before a mysterious, unceremonious departure due to "creative differences."

It's now been four years since Wright's last movie (2013's The World's End), but Baby Driver is worth the wait. It's as sharp and as hilarious as any Wright fan could reasonably expect, with a truly groundbreaking musical twist in which most of the story syncs up with the carefully selected, endlessly eclectic soundtrack. Every slam of a car door, every bullet, and every footstep means something. He takes the unserious completely seriously, with a killer eye for detail—and nearly torpedoed it all by using this idea in 2002 for an unexpectedly popular music video.

Before we start, I want to say: This is very exciting. I think I saw Shaun of the Dead when I was 13 or so, and it's been in my top five ever since. So thank you.Edgar Wright: Oh wow! That's great. Thank you.

I loved Baby Driver, and I think a good place to start is that this was very much like a music video you did fourteen years ago. This is kind of an idea you've had kicking around for some time now, right?It goes back even further than that. I was doing that music video, which was like 15 years ago now, and I used my idea for Baby Driver for that video in a moment of panic because I hadn't got any other ideas [laughs]. At the time when I did it back in 2002–this was before Shaun of the Dead even–I was really mad at myself because I felt like I had maybe squandered the idea.

Obviously, it didn't work out like that because people liked the video, and then because Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh [Writer's note:And now The Great British Bake-Off!] became more and more famous after the video came out, the video kept doing the rounds. Initially I was mad at myself. I thought, I've burned this great idea for a movie on this video. But then it would be something where I could always point to it and people sort of said, "Oh, your movie's like Drive or your movie's like Guardian." I would say, "Well, let me refer to this video I made in 2003."

I'm using this as a very positive descriptor: This is probably the nastiest film you've made. It's really funny, but the violence is a lot more pointed and threatening than we've come to expect from you. Why now?The truth of the matter is I didn't really write it as a comedy. I wrote it as an action heist, music-driven movie. I think that obviously there's humor that is inherent in the characters. Usually it's lulling you into a full sense of security. What I think I liked about the movie is that you're presented with some charming psychos, but they're still psychos. Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm and Kevin Spacey might all have funny moments, but you know bad things are going to happen.

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One of the things I really enjoyed about doing this movie is I wanted to make it very intense and have this increasing sense of dread, because the way I designed it, you start to get this fantasy of being a cool getaway driver, so whatever romantic notion you might have of being in a high-speed pursuit, of being a sexy, tall criminal, is slowly replaced by the nightmare of being a wanted man. The consequences of Baby's actions start to bear down with increasing weight as the movie goes on. That was always the idea for the movie. It was always intended to be a little darker, but I think also at the same time it's very hopeful.

I think you've got a really mature performance from Ansel Elgort especially. How did you go about casting Baby, and why was Ansel the guy for the job?I first started writing the script like 10 years ago, and didn't finish until 2011. I'd always wanted to make this movie, but in 2014 [when Wright left Ant-Man] it was like, What am I gonna do? I said, Okay, this is going to be the next movie.

I wanted to make it very intense and have this increasing sense of dread. Whatever romantic notion you have of being a sexy criminal is slowly replaced by the nightmare of being a wanted man.

And the first question from anybody at the studio is, well, who's gonna play Baby? Very quickly we started seeing all the young actors that were out there. Ansel was one of the first people I'd met and somebody that really stuck with me. He's charismatic and a great actor and has great physical presence. And he's a big music fan. He makes music, plays music, that element really factored into the movie and the decision. The character's always supposed to have these musical obsessions. That was perfect.

You're a very hands-on filmmaker, so what's the editing process for a film as meticulous as this? Like, you're not just handing it off to a bunch of guys in a dark room.Well the truth of it with this one is, because all of the music was clear before we'd started shooting, and because we're working through the music on set, we actually did a lot of our editing on set. One of the two editors, Paul Machliss was on it every day. We would be editing the film as we went along because we needed to make sure that it worked with the music. Jamie Foxx would always come over at the end of the day and would be astonished by what we'd done by the end of the day.

That way, you got a sense of how these things could work. That doesn't mean that we had a short edit afterwards. We would spend the next you know, seven months finishing the movie. We ended the shoot with a good idea of where we were at and how we were working.

I want to ask you about some of the tricks during shooting, especially during some of the longer takes, like Baby going to get coffee near the beginning. Were you playing the soundtrack on set for things like that?Yeah, it was all rehearsed. One of the tricky things with that is you have to find a space big enough to rehearse that shot, because he actually goes like two city blocks and back. On the day, so it was one long Steadicam shot lasting for 33 minutes. Within those blocks, there were various speakers around playing the song out loud, and then also Ansel would have the song in his ears. The camera operator would have the song as well. Everybody could hear it because everybody needs to know where they are in the song. Obviously in several points in that shot where extras or dancers have to come into vision on a specific point in the music.

Let's imagine there's a universe in which you want to make a sequel to Baby Driver. Are there any songs you'd want to include the next time around?[laughs] I've already made a playlist on my iTunes called "Baby Driver Two, question mark?" I can't divulge any of those songs because then I'd ruin the surprise if I ever did do that movie. Suffice to say, if I did a sequel, I have some really good ones.

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You've got some serious, well-regarded American actors in this movie. How was it directing Ansel alongside a legend like Kevin Spacey and an icon like Jon Hamm?It was a great thing with Jon, subverting his kind of persona, which was really you know, just really a crass thing to do. Jon was the only person that I wrote with him in mind, because I've known Jon since 2008. That was something where I really wanted him to play the part.

Below, watch an exclusive featurette about Jon Hamm's character Buddy and his girlfriend, Eiza Gonzalez's Darling.

Kevin and Jamie... a great thing about them is that both of those guys have been awarded for their dramatic work, and yet both of them are very funny. They've both got that presence, and it's also that they're both musical as well. Both of them have that just internal rhythm where they can make dialogue very snappy and almost sing-songy in places. Even it's all that tough guy kind of film noir dialogue, it's just fun because of the way those guys stick out.

Baby follows a noir tradition of not speaking much, and when he does—I didn't initially catch this—a lot of his lines are lifted from watching TV and movies. What inspired that?Baby is a great talker in some ways; like, he lives with a deaf foster father. You get a sense when Lily James (Deborah, Baby's love interest) shows up that he doesn't really engage with anybody that much at all. I like the idea that he's watching TV and he's kind of aping all of the lines that he's seen in places. Everything that's on the TV early on, whether it's Monsters Inc. or Fight Club or The Little Rascals or It's Complicated, he uses those lines later on in the movie.

I think you're one of those filmmakers whose movies definitely benefit from a second, even third viewing.Right. The more the merrier!

I know that you're a big fan of Ben Wheatley, who did Free Fire this year. Along with Baby Driver, those are kind of two of the best American action movies of the year—and they're both by Brits, both original. Why do British filmmakers make great American action?I don't know. I think there's a lineage of that in like... Okay, so let's go back. You've got John Boorman made Point Blank. Peter Yates made Bullitt. Tony Scott made True Romance. It's funny. I mean, this was my first movie shot in the States, even though I've worked here for over a decade. I've shot in Canada before. I think it's always useful bringing an outsider's eye to the proceedings.

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Shooting in Atlanta is immediately just interesting to me, using the real place. As soon as I decided to set it in Atlanta, I became very invested in the city, and I wanted to make an Atlanta person say, "Oh, you did a really good job of showing Atlanta, Georgia." That becomes the intention, to make the action fun and authentic but also provide a foreign, romantic eye on the place itself.

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